Bernie Sanders, Jack Shafer & The Day After
[Post “Super-Tuesday” Edition: This piece was originally uploaded in October of 2015. It still seems timely, even after four months, a dozen primaries and as many debates, with clearly emerging trends. The Sanders campaign has won several primaries, but lags in delegates behind Hillary Clinton. Yet at this point he still has many millions of dollars in his campaign treasury, raised from millions of supporters who are not yet ready to give up. The Washington media may prefer at this point to ignore him; but that’s only one more of their many mistakes this year. My guess remains that his impact on the election and public life is far from over.]
On this day [October 13, 2015] leading up to the first Democratic Presidential debate, I’m imagining Bernie Sanders and The Day After.
Which day?
The Day After he concedes the Democratic nomination, most likely to Hillary.
I’m not predicting this; but musing on the possible aftermath.
No doubt he’ll be disappointed. Bernie had run hard. His campaign was serious, and gathered a large popular base. But his drive fell short of the White House.
Even so, for his supporters, and for him once he processes the defeat, there are consolations. No — more than that, there are definite achievements, which losing the nomination will not diminish.
What are they? Here are the ones that seem to me already increasingly in view.
First, and perhaps most important, he has helped a substantial progressive constituency recover its voice, and regain a foothold of credibility in the highest levels of our policy debates.
But now the progressives are coming back. And there is no reason they should retreat, even if Bernie’s campaign fell short. Sanders is still in the Senate, his stature there enhanced. Moreover, he is not alone: Elizabeth Warren is a staunch, tough ally; the two of them will keep up the pressure, and there will be others joining them. They have nowhere to go but up.
Bernie’s future influence will be further extended by two additional factors, one personal and the other political.
On the personal side, Sanders made his mark on the campaign honorably, campaigning hard but with unfailing courtesy. I heard him boast that he had never run an attack ad in his forty year career, and I believe it. Yet I also heard him strongly and repeatedly criticize both Republicans and Democratic rivals, yet without name-calling or sleazy “dog-whistle” rhetoric. He’s been a fighter who is a gentleman.
This combination is rare enough in our public life; but beyond merely being admirable, it is one that will wear well. Sanders may have been defeated in his presidential run, but he has not been disgraced, nor have his ideas been discredited. He and they will persist.
On the political side, his disciplined focus on economic inequality has been expressed in policy proposals which, whether you like them are not, are rational and plausible. If he wants to spend more than a trillion dollars on infrastructure, education & expanded health care, he is also clear that all this would be paid for, with higher taxes. It would not be a shower of “free stuff”; there is no “voo-doo” in his economics.
Moreover, his stubbornly consistent message of economic justice was timely when he first raised it more than forty years ago, not long after president Lyndon Johnson had declared (and lost) a war on poverty. It has only become more intense through the years, is urgent now, and will remain high in public consciousness thru the next president’s term, whoever occupies the White House. Sanders will still be strategically positioned to affect coming policy debates.
Yet Bernie’s consistency leaves Politico columnist Jack Shafer rather bemused; Shafer finds it has deprived the “lame stream” media of the trivia & mindless gossip on which they mainly thrive, and which Sanders has so long scorned.
But that price is small compared to the benefits. I believe, even the Day After Bernie concedes, the country will have greatly benefited from his and the campaign’s example of dogged clarity and civility, maybe even more than if he had won. And while he will surely be tired after the months of campaigning, his positive public impact, and that of the renewed progressive movement, will be very far from exhausted.